Top 10 Instructional Design Certificates to Boost your Career

Instructional design courses are on the top if you want the hottest online jobs in today’s world. It has taken the field shape of all other professional jobs. An Instructional Designer can do everything from designing a system to developing materials and assessing their effectiveness. Instructional design certificate courses are available both online and offline.

The aspirant must start with the beginner’s course to find out what actually it is, what are the jobs, is of interest or not. After that, he can go for advanced courses.

Instructional Design

The certificate course content generally focuses on educational technology and online teaching strategies intending to help aspiring educators get a grip on online teaching. Between the beginner and advanced level, there is one more level called intermediate-level course.

Let me explain with an example, Gamification. This free course for intermediate learners is available on Coursera. The course content focuses on Gamification which is a strategy that incorporates digital game design techniques with social impact challenges.

1. Instructional Designer Certificate

With instructional design training for obtaining a certificate, the aspirant learns best practices for conducting a needs assessment, completing a job/task analysis, and designing and developing courses. The student must discover a structured step-by-step process to follow and apply immediately to the training program development.

The course duration is 9 months but the students can complete it with a period of 3 years. The total price for this 4-course program is 5712$. 

Certification Link – https://www.td.org

2. Instructional Design Models Certificate

The best place that provides this certificate is the International Society for Educational Technology. It helps professionals learn instructional design models and design approaches to create online learning experiences. Professionals who are seeking this certification complete a course that focuses on the theoretical principles of instructional design and how to apply those principles in educational settings.

The course includes 10 online modules that are covering topics such as the history and evolution of online learning, traditional instructional design models, and the progression to online learning. After completing each of the modules, professionals can earn the certificate. 

Certification Link – https://www.isfet.org

3. Adobe Captivate Courses (Udemy)

The fee for this course is $19.99 per course with a duration of about 2 hours per course. Udemy offers three Adobe Captivate courses that include Responsive Custom Quiz Questions, Focus on Simulations, and Focus on Demonstrations. These instructional design courses will teach the aspirant how to use the more advanced features of Adobe Captivate eLearning software. It uses sample projects to show how to use Captivate to go beyond the basics.

Here, the aspirant learns to build advanced actions for multiple-choice questions, create effective simulations and demonstrations using Adobe Captivate 8, Understand the Adobe Captivate screen recording process, Understand and configure the Mouse, Highlight Box, and Text Caption objects, choosing the correct output type based on the audience.

Course Link – https://www.udemy.com

4. Certified Professional in Talent Development

The Association for Talent Development (ATD) offers this certification for professionals who work in talent development, which involves teaching employees new skills to improve their productivity and engagement. The certification shows that professionals have knowledge of talent development models to enhance employee development.

Professionals can earn the certificate by passing an exam that evaluates their professional capabilities, such as training delivery and coaching, and organizational capabilities, such as business insight and change management. The organization requires professionals to have five years of experience in talent development and 60 hours of professional development, such as courses, webinars, or conferences. 

Course Link – https://www.credly.com

5. ATD Instructional Design Certificate

This certificate from ATD shows that professionals have the skills to design training programs that align with business goals. Professionals can earn the certificate by attending a two-day program or by completing seven online instructor-led sessions. The sessions focus on topics that help professionals gain skills in needs assessment and learn more about instructional formats and tools.

As part of the course, professionals write learning objectives and develop an evaluation strategy for training initiatives. There are no prerequisites for the certification, though ATD recommends the course for professionals with experience in learning and development. 

Certification Course – https://www.td.org

6. Learning to teach online

This course is offered by Coursera. It is a beginner’s program of 18 hours in which interested one can freely enroll but, if you want a certificate then it costs $49. In this curriculum, there are lots of video content, reading material, self-assessments, and graded assignments.

Being largely focused on the theory of online education and explaining certain concepts like the “flipped classroom” and “blended learning,” it reportedly suffers from a lack of practical material, e.g., tutorials on how to work with the actual software used for content authoring. 

Course Link – https://www.coursera.org/learn/teach-online

7. Workplace Instructional Design

This graduate certificate program learns how to define an organization’s learning needs, identify instructional formats, and design materials to achieve educational outcomes. For earning the certificate, professionals complete training projects to build a portfolio.

Students can take the course entirely online while networking with peers and mentors. Those who earn the certificate can also earn credits toward master’s degrees in management or organizational development psychology through the university. 

Course Link – https://www.boisestate.edu/opwl/programs-courses/certificate-instructional-design/

8. Instructional design for e-learning

This beginner’s course is offered by Udemy, it is a certificate of completion with cost 95$. This is another short introductory course for Instruction Design beginners. It has a lot of theory that requires practical practice. It is a good starting point for those who like to get acquainted with ID terminology and create their first digital training course. 

Course Link –  https://www.elearninglearning.com/instructional-design/

9. Instructional Design Certificate – 4 courses

This bundle of courses is a highly praised and extremely popular certificate program that consists of 4 courses, each encompassing a big topic, such as “trends and issues in instructional design,” “instructional strategies,” “designing computer-based training,” and “project management for ID.”

These courses are not informal introductory lectures, taking an academic certificate program like this one is a legitimate way to become a high-value asset on the ID job market, beating applicants who can’t boast such accomplishments to the punch.

Courses Link – https://www.uwstout.edu/programs/instructional-design-certificate

10. Master of Education in Learning, Design & Technology, Instructional Design & Development

This course is provided by the University of Georgia. The course duration is 3 years with a fee of $26,226. It has 6 semesters of material. The website states that, after completing it, the student will be prepared not just to apply some learning theory to creating Computer-Based Training (CBT), but will have enough hands-on experience to tackle any real-life instructional design challenge.

It also includes video production, project management, and analytics in ID, as well as learning the ropes of team-based project design.

Conclusion

In the above article, we have shared the top-ranking Instructional Design courses that can help an aspirant to professionally boost their potential and careers. With the growing need for skilled professionals, the demand for Instructional Design Courses has gone up in every field.

Consequently, we see that there is now a huge variety of courses now available online and offline for people to choose from as per their need. From the above-mentioned list, you can find out and see for yourselves and learn something new. Good luck!

Bradley Wood is a freelance writer who lives in Pomona, Los Angeles. He is pursuing graduation from the University of California (UC). Bradley frequently contributes his high-quality articles in Academics and Education to our site to help students in their day-to-day life.